Upside down silver award in AIPP APPA 2015

The original article was written when Zoom Studio was named Aguiar Photography.

Photography perspective and optical illusion scores silver

Canon  – APPA is the Australian Institute of Professional Photography’s annual national awards competition. It is a competition entered only by professional photographers and year after year it has produced incredibly beautiful prints.

This year it happened at the Melbourne Convention Centre as part of the Digital Show from 16 to 18 October 2015.  It is an event entered by more than 600 photographers and close to 3000 prints are judged.

Back to my entries for this year and the title of this post. You will understand it all soon.

This year I was very busy working on clients’ projects and printing for other photographers and left my submissions to the last few days. I selected 6 images that I like and started working on them.

I start by asking myself what is interesting or good in the image. The next step is to find a crop that helps in showing what it is that I like. From that point, I start color adjustments and luminosity changes and create versions. I normally print the top two versions and select the best.

The next steps are smaller local changes or retouches that may improve the image on their last 5 %. Perhaps a small reduction of a green tint in the whites of local sharpness on an area or mid-tone contrast on another area.

Well, this year I worked on one image from a small historic town (Diamantina – Minas Gerais – Brazil). I took this photo from the top of a mountain using a telephoto lens. The distance compresses the perspective of the houses (not the telephoto lens and some photographers may believe). The image was nice but was it special?

I showed a series of crops of the image to some friends and one of them picked up the image upside down and noticed that it creates an interesting optical illusion.

One very handy technique to analyze an image is to see it upside down. Your mind will lose the normal interpretation of the image and start searching for light and contrast points. It gives you a better understanding of “hot” points on the image and if they help or distract from the main subject or story.

It gave me another way to appreciate the photo. I am adding here a few variances of the photo and I would love to receive your comments.

These photos were taken by Jose Aguiar APP M.Photog.

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